Team:UGent/Project

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Overall project

The main goal of industrial biotechnology is to increase the yield of biochemical products using microorganisms as production hosts. This includes engineering large synthetic pathways and improving their expression. Overexpression of genes has mainly been achieved by using high or medium copy plasmids. However, studies have demonstrated that plasmid-bearing cells lose their productivity fairly quickly as a result of genetic instability.

Read more about plasmids

In industrial biotechnology, a common technique to express new synthetic products and pathways is the use of plasmids as vectors. Plasmids are easy to insert into cells and replicate independently from the genome, allowing strong gene expression. Overexpression is easily achieved by using plasmids with a medium or high copy number, different promoter systems, ribosome binding sites (RBS), etc. Thanks to plasmids, the industrial biotechnology has grown substantially over the past years. However, the use of plasmids entails some important disadvantages, which will be discussed below.

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Therefore a new method was developed for the overexpression of a gene of interest in the bacterial chromosome: Chemically Inducible Chromosomal evolution (CIChE). In this technique the chromosome is evolved to contain a higher number of gene copies by adding a chemical inducer. The original model for CIChE, however, results in bacterial strains containing a large number of antibiotic resistance genes. To make this valuable technique more widely applicable in the industry, we developed a model for chromosomal evolution based on a toxin-antitoxin system instead of antibiotic resistance.




Project Details

Part 2

The Experiments

Part 3

Results

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